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Key Points AMD said on Wednesday that it will lay off 4% of its global staff. AMD had 26,000 employees at the end of last year, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. AMD is the second-biggest producer of graphics processing units, or GPUs, behind Nvidia. ============================================================= AMD said on Wednesday that it will lay off 4% of its global staff as the longtime computer chipmaker seeks to gain a stronger foothold in the growing artificial intelligence chip space dominated by Nvidia. ″As a part of aligning our resources with our largest growth opportunities, we are taking a...

* Local residents say a power plant is heating Seneca Lake and emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gases. * The gas-fired plant is used to power at least 8,000 computers that are mining bitcoin. * The plant's CEO says it's operating within the law, and has created 31 jobs. Local residents have blamed bitcoin mining for heating up the largest of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, with one saying it's "so warm you feel like you're in a hot tub," according to a report by NBC News. Their complaints centre on a gas-fired power plant that's being used...

Former Pres. Trump: “Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam. I don't like it. I want the dollar to be the currency of the world.” Video...

Russian security officers have arrested several scientists working at a top-secret Russian nuclear warhead facility for allegedly mining crypto-currencies. The suspects had tried to use one of Russia's most powerful supercomputers to mine Bitcoins, media reports say. The Federal Nuclear Centre in Sarov, western Russia, is a restricted area.

Caracas (AFP) - Inside a locked room in an office building in Caracas, 20 humming computers use their data-crunching power to mine bitcoins, an increasingly popular tool in the fight against Venezuela's hyperinflation. In warehouses, offices and homes, miners are using modified computers to perform complex computations, essentially book-keeping for digital transactions worldwide, for which they earn a commission in bitcoins. While practiced worldwide, Bitcoin mining is part of a growing, underground effort in Venezuela to escape the worst effects of a crippling economic and political crisis and runaway inflation that the IMF says could reach 720 percent this year....

This is the first of a two-part series on the boom in Bitcoin computing infrastructure, and what it means for the data center industry. Emmanuel Abiodun once mined for Bitcoins on a desktop computer in his home. He’s now running 160 powerful computers in server space in Iceland, where the machines are cheap to power and cool. Later this year, Abiodun expects to have an empire of 4,000 bitcoin mining rigs spread across two continents, eventually filling nearly 5 megawatts of data center space.